Tanner Mirabel was a security specialist who never made a mistake ¿ until the day a woman in his care was blown away by Argent Reivich, a vengeful young postmortal. Tanner¿s pursuit of Reivich takes him across light-years of space to Chasm City, the domed human settlement on the otherwise inhospitable planet of Yellowstone. But Chasm City is not what it was. The one-time high-tech utopia has become a Gothic nightmare: a nanotechnological virus has corrupted the city¿s inhabitants as thoroughly as it has the buildings and machines. Before the chase is done, Tanner will have to confront truths which reach back centuries, towards deep space and an atrocity history barely remembers.

My second novel, but written concurrently with the later work on Revelation Space. I completed a draft of it in 1997, then returned to it after RS had sold, and the redrafting of CC proceeded more or less in parallel with work on the edits for RS. Although it’s clearly set in the same universe as the first book, I was pleased that it felt quite tonally different. My literary model, incidentally, was the Robicheaux novels of James Lee Burke.